The past few years, users and privacy groups have become more aware and consistent in calling out tech companies about their sometimes lax security and privacy practices. Following Apple’s recent push for privacy for their users, it looks like Google is following in their footsteps. They will be tightening some of their privacy policies when they roll out the Android 12 later this year, specifically preventing advertisers from tracking users that have opted out of personalized ads on their Android devices.
Google already lets Android users opt-out of personalized ads but in reality, even if they do, advertisers would still be able to send them unsolicited ads. That’s because each user still has an Advertising ID that software developers will be able to access. It’s a string of characters that identifies the user’s device so they will still be to use this to measure app usage or let advertisers detect and prevent invalid traffic. So basically, you still can’t escape them even if you told them not to “follow” you.
According to CNBC, that’s about to change with a policy update that Google will be rolling out to apps running on Android 12 devices later this year. It will eventually expand to apps that will be running on devices that support Google Play by 2022. Basically, when you opt out of personalized ads, even your Advertising ID will not be accessible for developers and advertisers. They will provide an alternate solution so use cases like analytics and fraud prevention can still be supported.
This is of course good news for users who are protective of their data that is being shared with all these tech companies. But Google’s revenue depends on advertising and so they will need to find alternative ways to place ads and track their effectivity. They have not announced anything yet for that side of their business to balance out protecting user privacy and how this will affect advertisers and their company revenues.
For now, we’ll have to wait for when Android 12 and the respective apps that will support them will roll out to see the privacy policy changes. That will start happening probably towards the end of the year.